These days, talking to IT leaders about cloud is eerily like talking about retirement.

Even though it might not be here yet, you know it's coming soon -- and investing for the future is prudent.

While individual strategies vary, common themes are thankfully starting to emerge.

For back-office functionality, a clear preference to move to SaaS -- usually triggered by a refresh or similar. ERP, HCM, SCM, CX and so on.

The payoff? Modern, connected business processes, delivered with a minimum of cost and effort.

For most new application development, a similar clear preference to use PaaS in the cloud. Better tools, better economics and better results.

And, for those applications that can leave the data center, move to either IaaS or some form of hosting model. Get them out of the data center -- if you can.

But there still remains a sizable subset of database-oriented applications that won't be leaving the data center anytime soon. Maybe it's latency concerns. Or regulatory compliance.

Or just a general unwillingness to let the family jewels go elsewhere.

More often than not, the database behind the applications in question is an Oracle database.

Which puts Oracle in a privileged position to answer a hard question for our customers: for those important applications, how do you move closer to the benefits of a cloud model -- without going to a public cloud?

Buy the research study! Attend the conference! Download the white paper!

Gartner does a good job of putting all the New Shiny Things in perspective with their infamous hype curve. Always a bit sobering to those of us who occasionally get swept away with unbridled enthusiasm.

But I'm here to argue that we'll see a lot less attention paid to new shiny things than we've seen in the past.

Why? These new capabilities will simply become integrated features of the IT services we will already be consuming in the cloud.

January 24, 2017

Several years ago, my wife decided to get an advanced degree in psychology, and became a counselor. Along the way, I was duly impressed by the therapeutic power of simply talking about a problem in a constructive manner.

These days, I joke that I've become a "cloud therapist" for many of the enterprise IT leaders I meet. They know they have a big challenge ahead of them, they just need to talk about it.

I've been told the conversations are usually helpful, which is good.

Over the years, some of my most stimulating discussions have been with Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon. Dave and I feed off of each other quite well: freely challenging each other's assumptions, and getting to the meat of the matter before too long.

And we always have fun.

A while back, we thought it'd be great if we could have these great dialogues in a more public forum. We agreed on a series of four interviews, each approaching the enterprise IT cloud challenge from different perspectives.

In the first interview I'll want to explore some of the deeper forces behind the move to cloud-like models for enterprise IT. Understanding why a problem exists in the first place is a big part of conquering any challenge.

Our second session will be looking at why existing approaches aren't working well for most enterprise IT groups. My general thesis is that most enterprise IT leaders want to move in a cloud direction, but are finding it much more difficult than it should be.

No surprise, I want to spend a session on what Oracle is doing to close enterprise IT cloud gaps, and have Dave poke holes as he usually does. Dave can be quite the skeptic.

And I want our final interview to explore different journeys enterprise IT organizations are taking to progressively adopt cloud models -- putting the ideas into practice, moving forward and delivering results.

If the past is any indicator, these should be great conversations -- especially if you enjoy point-counterpoint debates.

December 09, 2016

This morning, I came across this grim piece from Chris Mellor at The Register, detailing evidence of the violent restructuring in our familiar storage array market.

Call it confirmation bias, but many of us have seen this coming for a while, and have acted accordingly. The numbers have been mediocre for many quarters, but recently the pace seems to be accelerating.

It wasn't all that long ago that storage companies were almost semi-glamorous in the enterprise IT world: EMC, NetApp, HDS, Pure, Nimble, et. al. Great growth all around, and tons of VC flowing into the sector.

What happened? And should we think of this as a temporary aberration, or a permanent structural shift?

November 10, 2016

Many business leaders are now applying serious pressure towards their IT counterparts to move to a cloud model sooner than later.

Their motivations are unambiguous. Business people see cloud models delivering better IT services at a lower overall cost.

And no one wants to forego a significant competitive advantage.

But it can be harder than it looks -- at least, given many of the familiar public cloud options in the market.

Most larger enterprise IT landscapes are deeply integrated; almost woven together.

Applications aren't usually isolated; they feed, and are fed by, others. Critical business processes that power any enterprise can span dozens of individual application components. And like a central nervous system, the enterprise IT control plane spans all of it, keeping a watchful eye on performance and security.

Untangling the components incrementally, and attempting to move them to a public cloud model one at a time, is turning out to be far harder than it might look to be on vendor powerpoint.

Unfortunately, the basic nature of popular public clouds isn't genetically compatible with what enterprise IT is doing today. And therein lies a thorny problem.

November 04, 2016

Many of us have conditions that end up greatly affecting our quality of life.

It often takes many years to fully understand the situation, its impact on you, and the impact on those around you.

One of my personal challenges has been coping with RBS: Restless Brain Syndrome. I can't easily shut my brain down. I'd really like to be able to stop incessantly deconstructing and resynthesizing the world around me, but I can't.

Quite seriously, it has affected my quality of life, and my relationships with others.

September 07, 2016

Today is the day Dell officially acquires EMC. Having spent 18 years at EMC (and two at VMware), my attention keeps wandering to the topic -- and its meaning -- even though I've moved on to bigger and better things.

Maybe it's time for a little writing therapy?

We all have had plenty of time to process the single largest tech acquisition in history. Today, the combined DellEMC marketing machine is fully cranked up, blasting Happy Rays into the interwebs.

All as expected.

As most big events are a mixture of positives and negatives, this one is no exception.

New ideas in the IT world are bright, shiny objects that initially capture our attention. They then become utterly familiar, and the world progresses to newer, brighter and shinier things.

VMware was founded in 1998. It was acquired by EMC over 12 years ago. Next week, EMC disappears and becomes part of Dell. Life moves on. VMware has been very successful in helping to define what "private cloud" means inside a data center.

Amazon Web Services was publicly launched in 2006, a decade ago. It too has been wildly successful, and has helped to define what "public cloud" means outside of data centers.

Both can reasonably be described as "legacy", if nothing else than through age and maturity alone. Both could be described as providing infrastructure as a service, or IaaS. They also can be described as two competing industry forces attempting to capture each other's territory.

When it comes to enterprise IT, I can't make the argument that either is "winning" the IaaS wars. It appears to be a standoff, with no clear road ahead.

August 31, 2016

My argument, in a nutshell, was that the central value proposition for hyperconverged was taking cost out of infrastructure by consolidating less-important applications.

That creates two strategic problems for its vendors.

First, as it's all about saving money and not providing any relevant application-specific differentiation, all players will soon be in a race to the bottom: who can do the job for the least money?

Second, if the primary customer motivation is cost reduction, the next logical step would be to ship those virtualized clusters off to some sort of public cloud. Especially if it was super-easy to do so.

Basically, game over for on-premises vendors at that point. Once a workload has gone to the public cloud, there is precisely zero economic opportunity left for any of the familiar hyperconverged players because -- well -- none of them have a public cloud.

This move to the public cloud is not simple hand-waving on my part. It's way easier than you think, and is being widely used today.

I'm going to use Oracle Ravello as just one example as to why I am resolute in my prediction that -- before too long -- the hyperconverged category will collapse into the black hole of commoditization and irrelevance.

And, as a special bonus, I'll arm you with a new buzzword to impress your friends: cloud hypervisor.

August 24, 2016

Watching the current raft of hyperconverged players go at it in the blogosphere has turned into a movie where I've lost all interest in the plot and characters. Here's just one recent example of yet another intense piece from my colleague Chad Sakac.

The problem is that I'm just not interested anymore. I know how the movie predictably ends.

That wasn't always the case. Long-term readers will remember me going on and on about hyperconverged, etc. etc. Things change. I move on. Maybe you should too?

Here's the pitch: for medium-to-larger IT shops, hyperconverged isn't strategic, it's just a tactical cost-reduction tool. And if something isn't strategic to the people who buy large amounts of IT stuff, it's not strategic to me either. Everything else gets quickly commodotized.

Since I've historically done a decent job predicting shifts in the IT world, you might want to invest a few moments and understand my thinking.

June 30, 2016

With every industry trend, there frequently emerges a tipping point that signifies "yes, this is real, this is happening".

I offer for your consideration "cloud quotas".

The idea is simple: executive management, frustrated by progress, creates a timeline for the IT function to get to cloud, e.g. 80% of workloads by 2020 or similar. Yearly goals are established to get to the desired state.

And to put some teeth into it, the IT budget is then forcibly partitioned into two segments: cloud and non-cloud, starting with 2016. The proportion of earmarked cloud spend is raised every budgeting year until the desired strategic target is achieved.

The goals are structured in such a way that typical IT cloud-washing won't help much.

Yes, IT will get credit for moving desktop and collaboration out, and perhaps that handful of pilot applications that have been moved, and of course any SaaS implemented -- but IT is not likely to get credit for, say, that IaaS-only private cloud sitting in the data center.

This is not theoretical: I have seen many examples from around the globe. Where I've seen it implemented, it's non-negotiable.

It's real, and it's happening for more than a few large IT organizations.

June 07, 2016

I play in two different bar bands these days. I love it. I've been in about a half-dozen other bands, and have auditioned for maybe several dozen over the years.

When you invest the time and energy with the right people, it can be enormously fun and deeply satisfying.

However, much of the time, not so much. Finding the right band situation isn't easy. One or more things won't click -- often out of your control -- and you have to make the tough choice to stick it out, or move on.

Are work situations so different? Not from my perspective.

When it all works and works well, teams in the workplace can be huge fun and deeply satisfying. Other times you have to decide whether to slog through it, and hope for the good stuff down the road apiece.

And if the magic doesn't materialize, sometimes the wise decision is to politely move on and set up shop elsewhere.

Yes, I was seriously seduced early on. Check out this Jan 2009 post where I breathlessly made the case for this new private cloud model. If I wasn't the first person to do so, I was certainly close to being the first.

I argued vigorously for the cause for many years. For me, it was the right answer at the right time.

I hereby publicly admit the error of my ways. The world has changed, and so must I.

Why is it that traditional private clouds have left most IT shops at a dead end?

April 18, 2016

If you're a grizzled infrastructure guy like me, you're completely justified in your skepticism when any vendor claims to have announced something Truly NewTM.

I mean, how many flash arrays, converged thingies, etc. does the world need?

Because we tend to focus on the underlying technology, we tend to miss other equally important innovations. For example, Uber didn't really introduce new technology to the world; they just changed a familiar consumption model.

A few weeks back, Oracle announced a new industry category -- cloud machines -- under the banner "Cloud At Customer". First up: the Oracle Cloud Machine -- on-prem PaaS/IaaS targeted at enterprise application developers.

Simply put, it's a public cloud model delivered in the data center. It fundamentally changes the familiar consumption model.

In the short time since, I've been seriously stunned by the level of customer and partner interest. People immediately grasp the concept, realize that it's fundamentally different alternative, and are immediately curious.

We must be on to something here :)

Sure, I personally thought the notion of a cloud machine was going to be successful. But at the end of the day, what I think doesn't matter that much; the opinion of thousands of IT professionals matters far more.

In the automotive world, a defective part from a supplier can result in expense and tragedy. Witness the massive Takata airbag recall, affecting dozens of manufacturers and tens of millions of vehicles on the road today, including potentially yours :(

The IT world is no different, we are all dependent on components from others, especially Linux and open source code. Bugs are found, some are serious -- and they must be quickly patched at considerable effort and expense, otherwise tragedy may await.

Last week, a particularly nasty bug was found in the widely used glibc code that enabled bad guys to essentially take over a DNS server. More details here, here and here.

The severity of the bug resulted in a "PATCH NOW!" directive to the IT community at large. While not as nasty as the infamous Heartbleed or Venom bugs, this one merited a serious and immediate response.

For many IT shops, this sort of all-too-common fire drill involves not only a lot of effort, but downtime as well.

Within many IT shops, the notion of a private cloud became quite popular -- a cool thing to do. An awful large number of ordinary virtualized server clusters got internally -- and aspirationally -- rebranded as "private cloud".

Fast forward to 2016 -- and cloudwashing is still with us, but in a different form. Early versions of cloudwashing were responses to clear gaps between expectations and reality.

Modern cloudwashing is no different.

I would argue that, when it comes to enterprise IT cloud strategies, we're still cloudwashing ourselves: vendors and IT shops alike.

January 21, 2016

It's become an obligatory part of most enterprise IT conversations I have -- what's the latest org structure?

I joke that most enterprise IT shops are always in one of three states: (1) in the middle of a reorg, (2) getting over the last reorg, and (3) preparing for the next big reorganization.

I have been unable to find any useful industry data to confirm my impression that many larger IT shops appear to be in an almost-perpetual state of reorganization and realignment. Much more so it seems than other corporate functions: sales, marketing, finance, HR, etc.

December 17, 2015

I have been prattling on about cloud topics for over six years now, helping IT practitioners come to terms with the changing world around them. It has often become a soul-searching, emotion-laden discussion.

Maybe I should get business cards that say "Cloud Therapist"?

In the last few months, it seems that cloud angst has started to reach an entirely new highs.

No such thing as a short meeting when someone needs to pour their heart out.

I think that's because -- when it comes to cloud -- most enterprise IT thinkers are waking up to the realization that they've hit an architectural wall, and it's starting to hurt.

December 04, 2015

The cloud discussion has been percolating through IT for about seven years now. It shows every sign of now going to a full boil.

Most every IT leader I meet is now accountable for having an acceptable "cloud strategy" of some sort.

Up to now, I think it's fair to say that most IT leaders have been playing what might be charitably described as an edge game, largely by keeping cloud at the periphery of the IT landscape, and far away from the core.

Time is running out.

Sooner or later, cloud is going to crash into the core of IT.

Just like two planets colliding, the result will look very different for both. And the decisions you make today will greatly affect what the new world looks like when the inevitable happens.

November 12, 2015

And while we're at it, where does the whole category of converged and hyperconverged vendors go from here?

Right now, this is the #1 question I get from colleagues, IT pros and industry-watchers.

Make no mistake: I was a passionate advocate of VCE -- at the time. Many of my colleagues have worked for VCE, or -- in some cases -- still work for VCE. By the way, a big shout-out to my colleague Nina Hargus, just promoted from being VCE's CMO to EMC's.

I tend to want to wish people the best, but unfortunately the future looks quite dark through my lens.

November 04, 2015

Coming off of Oracle Open World, the message was clear: cloud, cloud and more cloud.

Larry Ellison called it the biggest industry transition since the desktop PC. In my words: cloud in all its sundry forms fundamentally re-invents how IT services are produced and consumed.

It's the new design pattern for enterprise IT architectures.

Turmoil and controversy abound as a result. On the vendor side, not all of the current industry players will cross the chasm. Many have tried, and are flailing. On the enterprise IT side, hard choices and big bets need to be made, and soon.

I've seen some of the industry press express skepticism around Oracle's cloud ambitions. While we're all entitled to our opinions, not all of us have the same insight into what really seems to be happening.

I've looked at cloud from my previous employers: EMC and VMware. I've worked with service providers on architectures and business models. And I've spent way too much time in the bowels of enterprise IT. I, too, am entitled to my opinions.

Here I present my personal, biased case for Oracle's cloud strategy in all its forms -- evaluated as a mature paradigm through the lens of enterprise IT. As always, none of this has been reviewed or approved by my employer, and I of course will take personal responsibility for any factual errors herein.

October 26, 2015

There was a time decades ago when I was intensely interested in CPU technology. RISC, CISC, all that.

Endless debates about which one was "better", which one was going to win in the long term, etc.

Well, we know how the story ended up for most of the datacenter market: it’s mostly an Intel world. Like most people, I thought "well, that's that": most everything was going to run on x86 unless there was a good reason not to.

Sort of like regular-grade unleaded gas, or basic cable TV.

Fast forward a bunch of years, and I land at Oracle. I find that the Sun-derived technologies are alive and well, and carving out a fascinating market segment where everyday x86 doesn't do so well: demanding workloads where using a fewer number of smarter processors can do more work than a boatload of familiar x86.

As part of this week's Oracle Open World and the launch of the new M7 processor, I enjoyed getting my CPU geek back on, and found a lot to really like.

October 20, 2015

One of the red-meat topics in IT guaranteed to spark a debate is the topic of "lock in", e.g. the difficulty in moving away from a given technology should the desire present itself.

Lock-in is frequently presented as an evil thing, to be avoided at all costs.

The reality is a bit more nuanced: if you're working in enterprise IT, some degree of lock-in is inevitable -- there will always be switching costs involved. For experienced practitioners, it's just one more aspect of a complex equation to be managed and optimized.

Like most aspects of enterprise IT, I've given the topic considerable thought, as I'm sure others have done.

When I was at EMC, lock-in was a huge customer concern. At VMware, paradoxically it didn't come up all that much. And now that I'm in Oracle, I'm back in the middle of lock-in debates.

October 19, 2015

So much has been written about the tech industry's largest buyout -- a mind-numbing $67 billion.

It's been exactly one week since the announcement -- just enough time for me to get my thoughts in order. 19 years at EMC, two years at VMware -- yes, I'm entitled to an opinion or two.

As you might expect with a transaction of this magnitude and complexity, it's going to take some time. I figure 9-12 months to close, another 6-9 months of getting organized, so we'll be well into 2017 before we all know how it ends up. That's two years from now -- assuming that there aren't any significant legal challenges.

Here's the problem: a lot can happen in two years. Not good to be sitting on the sidelines, waiting for future clarity.

As with everyone who's been involved with EMC, VMware and all the other players, there are mixed emotions all around. Some of the articles got a few key points right, a few I thought were way off base.

And there was a whole lot of echo chamber.

Bottom line: although I wish all my ex-colleagues well, this event does not bode well for those employed by horizontal technology vendors.

October 08, 2015

Many IT infrastructure groups are intent on building their own landscapes, using horizontal technologies.

Maybe they want to standardize on HP servers, vSphere for virtualization, RedHat for Linux, Cisco for the data center network, EMC for the storage, and so on.

The specific choices aren't relevant in this argument; the underlying philosophy is what matters.

The newer thinking in this arena is pre-integrated stacks: converged (e.g. VCE Vblocks, HP CI, etc.) or perhaps some of the newer hyperconverged offerings (e.g. VMware's EVO, Nutanix, etc.). Less effort all around thanks to a modicum of integration, but still a generic stack by any other name.

So, let me ask a clarifying question: what are the most important and demanding workloads in your landscape?

I'm guessing it's databases, and the applications that use them. Might it make sense to think in terms of *optimized* stacks for these crown jewels vs. generic ones?

If your business is heavily invested in databases, maybe mainstream generic infrastructure thinking isn't doing you any favors.

September 25, 2015

One of the more popular buzzwords in our industry is consolidation: the idea of combining multiple individual workloads into a single platform or system.

The stated goal is usually around saving money, although there are certainly other benefits.

Newton's Third Law states that for every action in nature, there is an equal opposing reaction, and consolidation is no exception.

I think IT vendors tend to push consolidation without a full appreciation for the very valid opposing forces. And I think IT organizations sometimes lack the will to overcome these resisting forces in pursuit of a better outcome.

Case in point: now that I'm at Oracle, I see these amazing cost-saving proposals around database consolidation. We're talking eye-popping big savings numbers, buttressed with a rock-solid justification. But I don't see nearly enough leaders acting on these opportunities.

September 21, 2015

Enterprise IT is a tough job for most practitioners. The list of things that need to be done never stops growing, and resources are always constrained.

Distractions don't help, and there are no shortage of these it seems.

One of the biggest IT distractions I've witnessed -- and perhaps most damaging -- has been what I call "cloud envy".

Maybe call it "Google envy" "Amazon envy" or perhaps "Facebook envy"?

The symptoms are always the same. Folks in IT leadership become enamored with what these web-scale companies are doing with their clouds. They may even visit with them, take the data center tour, all that. They are inevitably dazzled by the experience. They come away thinking, "hey, maybe we could do that too!".

Much time and effort is then lost chasing a dream that isn't right for them: wrong model, wrong motivations, wrong abilities, etc.

Precious resources that could have been spent on things that really move the needle get needlessly frittered away on a fantasy that can't -- and shouldn't -- happen.

There’s now a burgeoning category "integrated" solutions intended to lessen that burden and produce more predictable results with less effort -- reference architectures, converged systems, hyperconverged systems and similar.

Each of these are attempting to tackle the same ugly reality: do-it-yourself IT infrastructure is losing its appeal. The projects take too long, they cost too much, they sap precious IT resources, they require unique skills and they often produce unpredictable or substandard results.

Somewhat uniquely, Oracle has invested heavily in what it calls “engineered systems”. I’ve come to appreciate it’s a completely different take on the broader infrastructure solutions category.

September 01, 2015

Yes, I've moved to Oracle to work on infrastructure products and solutions.

What I haven't shared yet was my real motivation -- a deep and fundamental shift in my personal perspective of what's really going on in the enterprise IT industry -- and what's happening in enterprise IT shops.

For me, when I realize the world has substantially changed, then I inevitably have to make a change in response.

That's a decent piece of career advice, by the way.

Needless to say, ours is a dynamic industry -- both on the supply side and the demand side.

Enterprise IT shops are getting slammed to do more with less. They don't have the time, the money or the people to address even a small fraction of what they could potentially contribute.

Worse, they tend to spend far too much time on things that don't create unique value, and far too little time on things that could really move the needle.

That's the uncomfortable truth.

Enterprise IT vendors are getting slammed as well: the commoditization of IT infrastructure, death-match competition, overly-funded startups running amok, the cloud in all of its many forms, activist investors -- you name it, it's happening.

That's another uncomfortable truth.

What attracted me to Oracle is that they have good, solid and substantiated answers to both challenges.

June 30, 2015

Many of you who follow the going-ons in our little corner of the IT industry may have noticed a continuing dust-up between myself and many Nutanix employees.

Competition is generally a good thing for our industry, when done right. Maybe I'm naive, but I think that IT professionals deserve ready access to critical information that could impact their decision.

As every IT pro knows, a lot is at stake when you sign that PO for that new thing :)

It's funny -- not many folks want to go toe-to-toe against another company in a public forum. For some reason, that isn't a problem for me. I consider it a healthy industry behavior.

Since this isn't my first competitive rodeo in the industry, I thought I'd share how I go about being a strong industry competitor when the situation arises. Usually, the trigger is a competitor who is seriously and consistently misrepresenting reality, as I believe the case is here. And getting to the truth can be hard for many IT pros -- so I do want to help.

Who knows? For those of you who work at IT vendors, you too might be called to do what I do!

The rationale is simple: we are conditioned by evolution to focus on — and thus avoid — the negatives in our lives vs. celebrating the positives.

Although few of us will have the opportunity to partake in their 10 week, four-step program — it made me reflect on how I’ve been challenged over the years to crack that code for myself. It wasn’t easy.

And I meet so many good people who are trying to be happier.

I don't know what will work for them, but I do know what worked for me.

And I’m really enjoying seeing the creativity from our hardware partners in coming up with clever and unique configurations. The more the better!

At EMC World, the Intel team certainly raised the bar on impressive off-the-shelf Virtual SAN configuration — a 32-node all-flash NVMe-capable VSAN configuration that delivers both outrageous performance and substantial capacity in a slick single-rack footprint.

Better yet, they splurged for some very cool custom bezel graphics. After all, it’s all about how your equipment looks, right?

I tweeted out a picture and a brief description from the show floor. My twitter gang went so crazy commenting and retweeting, I thought I should loop back and share more detail.

In particular, I wanted to interview John Hubbard — the cool cat at Intel that put this impressive rig together in very short order.